ABSTRACT
The bad news about ShrinkRapt is that its clinical potential remains, mostly, potential. The good news is that ShrinkRapt works. It concentrates on the fundamentals, stimulates thinking, and appears to be backed up by a creative and dedicated company. It is versatile enough to fit many practice styles and volumes of record keeping. A solo practitioner with a part-time psychotherapy practice and a Macintosh in the office can enter data at the end of the day or the end of a session, typing up patients' progress notes while they are still fresh in memory and keeping abreast of session data and documentation requirements. At the end of the month, a few keystrokes generate bills and claims forms.
Subject(s)
Database Management Systems , Practice Management, Medical/organization & administration , Psychiatry , Psychotherapy , Humans , Practice Management, Medical/economicsABSTRACT
Natural killer (NK) cells are important in immune function and appear, in part, to be regulated by the CNS. The authors compared NK cell activity and MMPI scores of 111 healthy college students and found weak but statistically significant correlations between NK values and psychopathology for 10 of 12 scales. Students with the highest NK values had a "healthier" MMPI profile than those with the lowest. Students with high MMPI scores (T greater than 70) had NK values below the sample median. These findings support theories of interaction between mental state and immune status, but the mechanisms and direction of interaction remain largely unexplored.
Subject(s)
Killer Cells, Natural/immunology , MMPI , Mental Disorders/diagnosis , Students/psychology , Adolescent , Adult , Female , Humans , Male , Mental Disorders/immunology , Mental Disorders/psychologyABSTRACT
Previous research has linked stress with adverse health change; however, the immunologic mechanisms mediating these changes remain poorly understood. To test whether "stress" was associated with alterations in cell-mediated immunity, we examined the correlations of self-reported life change stress (LCS) and psychiatric symptoms with natural killer cell activity (NKCA) among 114 healthy undergraduate volunteers. Although the bivariate correlation between LCS and NKCA was not significant, subjects reporting few psychologic symptoms in the face of large amounts of LCS ("good copers") had significantly higher NKCA than those experiencing high levels of both symptoms and LCS ("poor copers"). Furthermore, self-reported psychiatric symptoms were found to inversely correlate with NKCA, suggesting that symptoms such as anxiety and depression may negatively affect immunity.
